Mission Mission

Our pal Mike got fed up with all the gentrification in San Francisco and moved to Indonesia for some good old-fashioned slumming it. Unfortunately, he’s sent back word that our worst fears have been realized: Jakarta is the new Marina! Street carts! Obscure ice cream flavors! Is no one safe?

One of our favorite bands to ever come out of the city is finally ready for you to hear all the songs they’ve been writing for the past year on a brand new full length LP, and they could definitely use your help!  And the rewards for this Kickstarter are pretty rad too.  I mean, imagine Social Studies coming out to play your house!  Check out all the details here!

If you’ve never heard Social Studies, they’re kind of impossible to describe, so just settle down and listen for a second:

Previously:

• Social Studies on Backseat Beat

In a candid shot. Seen through a window.

It was like the 1996 Summer Olympics all over again, minus leotards, plus anonymous challengers, and all in an arena traveling up to 80 miles per hour. Thank you, BART gymnasts, for the best BART ride ever!

[Amazing photos via Jess]

And the first inductee is . . . our pal George “Butternuts” Duran, one of Rhea’s longtime behind-the-counter warriors. In case you were wondering, he gets his nickname from the basketball court where he is quite the beast and will taunt you by yelling “Butternuts” every time he busts a shot in your eye, reminding everyone that his stroke is smooth as butter.  Yes, sometimes basketball sounds dirty.

Another notable catchphrase of his destined to be lost in the annals of folklore is “WAMU!”  This is uttered anytime he hits a bankshot off the backboard into the hoop, because even though we’d usually be playing on the weekend, the bank is still open (zing!).  Curiously, when WAMU got absorbed by Chase back during the financial crisis, the new name didn’t quite stick, so we just kept kept yelling “WAMU” anytime an inappropriate bankshot found its way into the hoop.  Of course, there are now newer, younger players who came through after the bank went under and consequently have no idea what we are talking about.

But that’s how folkore works, right?  RIP Alan Dundes.

Everyone’s got stories to tell, but sometimes the people with the most interesting ones don’t have a way to tell them, or perhaps don’t even know that they can.  Enter Streetside Stories, a Mission-based non-profit that’s doing some amazing work with local kids.  Check out the video to see if it’s something with which you might want to get involved.

Are you South Asian? Our friend Amit Gupta might need some of your sweet brown bone marrow. Are you not South Asian? Chances are someone else needs your bone marrow too.

To put the odds into perspective, if you need a bone marrow transplant and you’re caucasian, the chances are 8 in 10 that you’ll find a suitable match. If you’re Indian, it’s more like 1 in 20,000. Help Amit and others smash those odds by stopping by Project One tonight and submitting a sample. All you have to do is fill out some paperwork and swab the inside of your cheeks with a Q-tip. Bring your brown friends!

Project One is at 251 Rhode Island St. and the event goes from 7-10:30pm.

New trends in sitting: using your bike lock cable as a makeshift footrest.

So says our pal Deep, who you may remember came home Saturday night to discover that the plyceratops mural in front of his house had been graffiti bombed.  Well, that just gave him an excuse to hang out the next day (which happened to be a lovely sunny Sunday–nice work Indian summer!) with his buddy Adrian again to fix it.

Moreover, in doing so, they actually made it better, adding an additional dinosaur and some other small stuff to cover up parts of the offending tag.  I’m quite inspired by the deep philosophy here:  If someone tags your shit, tag it back!  You can complain all you want and you’ll probably even be right, but the best way to have an effect on the community is to get your hands dirty and do something about it yourself!